Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

takes place in the private realm is unimportant. But is that a fact? The private life of Agnes Huntingdon (born after 1320) is revealed through snippets in public documents from the court cases concerning her two marriages.⁸² We discover that she was a victim of domestic abuse, and that her first marriage was disputed because her family disapproved of her choice. On the evening of 25 July 1345 she ran away from her second husband after he attacked her; later that night he turned up at her brother’s house with a knife. Is the abuse (and lack of freedom of choice) of a fourteenth-century woman private irrelevancies, or part of the history of female subjugation?

The arbitrary division of the world into ‘private’ and ‘public’ is in any case arguably a false distinction. Invariably both bleed into each other. When I spoke to Katherine Edwards, a history teacher who was heavily involved in the fight against Gove’s reforms, she pointed to recent research on women’s role in the American Civil War. Far from being an irrelevance, ‘women and their conception of their own role completely undermined the whole Confederate war effort’.

Elite women, brought up to believe absolutely in the myth of their own helplessness, simply could not get over their understanding of work as intrinsically unfeminine. Unable to bring themselves to take up the jobs vacated by enlisted men, they wrote to their husbands begging them to desert, to come home and protect them. Poorer women proved a headache in a more proactive way, as they organised resistance to Confederate policies, ‘because they were starving basically, and they needed to feed their families’. Excluding women from an analysis of the outcome of the American Civil War not only constitutes a gender data gap, but also a data gap in the understanding of the construction of the United States itself. That seems like a ‘fact’ worth knowing.

The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account for half of humanity – not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about ourselves. It has fuelled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact.

The persistence of this myth continues to affect how we see ourselves today – and if the past few years have shown us anything it is that how we see ourselves is not a minor concern. Identity is a potent force that we ignore and misread at our peril: Trump, Brexit and ISIS (to name just three recent examples) are global phenomena that have upended the world order – and they are all, at heart, identity-driven projects. But misreading and ignoring identity is exactly what obfuscating maleness under the guise of gender-neutral universality causes us to do.

A man I briefly dated tried to win arguments with me by telling me I was blinded by ideology. I couldn’t see the world objectively, he said, or rationally, because I was a feminist and I saw everything through feminist eyes. When I pointed out that this was true for him too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just objective, common sense – de Beauvoir’s ‘absolute truth’. For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.

I was reminded of this man in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, when it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘calling out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women voters’.⁸³ This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with ‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been reading his V. S. Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’.

Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour⁸⁴ explaining that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’⁸⁵ In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’,⁸⁶ while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.⁸⁷

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism. ‘I have no tribe,’ he wrote. He could not ‘join the prevailing hysteria’. What he wanted was ‘to re-enact the glorious revolution of 1832’ – which resulted in the extension of the British franchise to a few extra hundred thousand men of property.⁸⁸ Heady days, indeed.

These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median